Hover Hand

Confirmed 1,134,753

About

Hover Hand is an awkward photo pose in which the subject wraps an arm around a companion with their hand hovering away from the companion's body. Often spotted in casual group photographs, hover hands usually signify that the person feels uncomfortable or lacks the confidence required to make physical contact.

Origin

On October 21st, 2010, a post titled "And now, awkward moments with Summer Glau" was submitted to the Internet humor site Fark^[1] with several pictures of the American actress posing with fans of the sci-fi television series Firefly. Fark user rcf1105 commented to the post saying, "Hover hand: sad no matter what the context. Please, let's stop hover hand. Together."

Spread

The same day the photos with Glau were submitted to Fark, Reddit user Youranmoron submitted another image (shown left) from the same compilation in a post titled “Notice the hover hand. Forever Alone ;_;”^[2] A month later, an edited version of the image was submitted in a post titled “Hoverhands – the forever alone hug”^[14] by Redditor yarissey with the caption “Hover hand / so close, yet, so far” (shown right).

On November and December of 2010, the image was posted on sites like Buzzfeed^[3], FunnyJunk^[4], Cheezburger^[5]and the “Fuck Yeah, Hover Hands" Tumblr.^[13] On December 5th, one of the earliest discussion threads dedicated to the topic surfaced on the Bodybuilding^[7] forums, which led to over 26 pages of hover hand example images.

On December 6th and 7th, TheHoverHand.com^[8] and HoverHands.net^[9] and HoverHands.org^[18] hover hand photo single topics blogs were launched. On December 10th, a compilation of hover hand images was published on the humor blog Now That's Nifty.^[11]

On September 27th, 2011, the Internet humor site College Humor^[15] published a satirical video (shown above) about a Photoshop hover hand removal tool. On December 21st, 2011, a post titled "Hover hand level 50 reached" hit the front page of the /r/pics subreddit with a photo of a man hover handing with 3 women.^[17]

As of April 17th, 2012, a Facebook page for "Hover Hand" has received 1,630 likes.^[16]

Several news outlets have used the phrase "Hover Hand" in various celebrity articles, such as Fox Sports' Sean Lee's funny hoverhand on a hula girl^[19] or Katy Perry's joking hoverhand on Anna Kendrick in Uproxx.^[20] The prevalence of Hoverhand had grown so wide by July 2013, that Kotaku wrote a piece about how it is considered good manners in South Korea,^[21] a stark contrast into how it is perceived in the west.

Keanu Reeves Pictures

On July 3rd, 2018, Redditor mataleetachu submitted a picture of Reeves hover handing while posing with two young women, captioned with a Matrix-themed joke about Reeves dodging lawsuits (shown below).

On June 8th, 2019, Twitter user @KemziLinzi posted several photographs of actor Keanu Reeves hover handing while posing for photographs with women, along with the caption "Lol Keanu ain't taking no chances" (shown below). Within 72 hours, the tweet gained over 380,000 likes and 79,000 retweets.

In response, many replied saying that Reeves was merely being respectful to the women by refraining from touching them in the photos.^[22]

On June 11th, YouTuber Tim Pool uploaded a video about the photos titled "Keanu Reeves Exposes The Sad State Of Me Too Feminism," which speculated that Reeves was abstaining from touching women while posing for photographs due to fears of being accused of inappropriate behavior (shown below).